Collaborativeness

Collaboration is an important part of being a teacher. If teachers don't collaborate with one another, their teaching will never change and their students will never benefit. If we never change our teaching, we won't grow as teachers and we won't be teaching to our fullest potential. Collaboration allows us to grow because when we converse with other teachers, we become open to many different ways of teaching. We can incorporate some ideas and we can dismiss others and hopefully, in the process, our teaching will grow into a strong act.

Collaboration is different from group work and cooperative learning because in both of these situations, the work is inflicted upon a group of people. it's not voluntary. Group work can be a negative experience because in a group, people may choose not to do the work, thus leaving it up to one or two people in the group to carry all of them. Group work is when you have something to accomplish and have to consistently converse to reach that goal. This is different from collaboration because although collaboration does contribute to the development of teachers, it is not a goal-oriented act. Collaboration happens on its own most of the time, and it consists of one or more individuals conversing over one or many subjects. Collaboration is when a group of individuals plays ping pong with ideas until they find one worthy of implementing into a real situation. Group work is not so much.

Cooperative learning and collaboration can be easily confused as well. Cooperative learning refers to multiple individuals working together to learn something in or more areas. Again, this is different from collaboration in that collaboration is not meant to learn something new, but inevitably, learning is the result. Also, in cooperative learning, there are answers for things. Collaborating has no answers. All that happens in collaboration is the bouncing of ideas off of one another and then testing those ideas to see if they work. There is no perfect solution to teaching, which is why collaboration is so important. Although we may not get to that point of being a "perfect" teacher, collaboration will get us closer to accomplishing that.